


Friend of My Youth

by englishable



Series: Hieros Gamos [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 08:07:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18869167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Or, five times Thor did not fall in love with his friend and the one time he did: though, properly speaking, he has been falling in love with her for most of his life, and perhaps this is why he has been so slow about realizing it.





	Friend of My Youth

**Author's Note:**

> This can also be read as linking to and connecting (at least towards the end) with "Shield-Maiden," mostly because it's easier to pick a fan speculation and stick with it. Thank you as always for reading.

…

1.

Every day for a week, around about sunrise, Thor goes down into the training yard and watches the black-haired girl fight with her shadow.

She arrives before even the swordmasters and admits herself to the yard by way of an old wych elm that overhangs the wall, since its gates are closed from the inside and she possesses neither the skill nor the subtlety of temperament that would induce her to pick the lock. The yard is freshly raked each night and the girl kicks free from her boots to leap bare-foot through the cool, unblooded sand while she flails her sword against an indifferent wooden pell.

The girl has no talent for the art of war, according to what the masters have reported and what can be observed even by someone of Thor’s rather limited experience. She cannot envision her way through all the separate motions, which together form a lunge or a parry or a riposte, and will therefore do the same thing wrong fifty times in brutal succession without pause. She tires easily but never stops.

Thor always sits atop the eastward-facing wall to study her. He shouts down an occasional suggestion that the girl adopts – or tries to – without acknowledging him, but otherwise she says nothing.

Then, on the morning of the eighth day, he swings himself through the yellowed leaves of the elm tree to land on his feet in the sand. The girl halts.

“You,” Thor extends his hand, “let me see that sword a minute.”

The girl is blinking sweat from her eyes and shaking either from exhaustion or the pent-up violence that gives her such an inefficient but maddened energy. The blunt tip of her practice sword sags immediately to the ground and she raises it again with some effort.

“You,” she points the sword at him, “can see it well enough from where you’re standing, your majesty.”

He laughs but keeps his hand outstretched in facile expectation. The girl, pinking like a boiled crayfish at her own impertinence, comes forward with her head bowed and puts the sword in his waiting hands. Thor swings it several times and turns to examine the wooden handle.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

The girl is still trying to catch her breath. She has an angled chin, a wide face, a nose that tapers down to a sharp tip like a candle and a hard, somewhat cold little mouth.

“Sif, your majesty. Daughter of Sigurd.”

“And tell me, Sif, daughter of Sigurd –” Thor gives the sword’s wooden handle a twist; it breaks along the thinly-concealed seams to reveal the iron shavings that have been poured into it by one of the other novices “—when did you plan on telling somebody that you’ve been training with a weapon weighted a quarter-stone heavier than it’s meant to be?”

“I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“That’s only what they’d want me to do, your majesty – besides, it weighs closer to what a real sword does than the ones they’ve given everybody else for practice.” She lifts her chin. “They’ll be sorry they let me have such an advantage.”

“But you can hardly lift it.”

“It doesn’t matter what I can do,” she says. “I have to. I’ll manage the in-between.”

The autumn morning is cold and Sif’s nose starts to drip. She sniffs a great, sucking breath and does not look down again; her words do not make a great deal of sense, to Thor, but he puts the sword in her hands anyway and returns the courteous bow.

“As you wish, Lady Sif.”

She smiles at him, suddenly, which makes him realize that her mouth is not so cold after all and that her eyes are the color of greengage plums. He leaves by way of the elm tree down which he has come.

“Tell the swordmasters to let her stay,” he informs his father, later.

“Ah.” This is Odin’s immediate response to everything; Thor gets the funny sense most of their conversations are turned backwards, so he comes away understanding less and less each time they speak to one another. “You see some potential in her, do you?”

“She sees it in herself,” Thor says. “That ought to count for something.”

…

2.

Sif walks with him as far as the entrance to the upper halls and then departs, crossing the courtyard and making her way along the wending, terraced garden paths and down the stairs covered by archways. There is mud spattered up her back and dead twigs in her hair; they have spent the whole day tracking one another through the mountains, cutting for sign and crawling through the underbrush. Sif, it has been determined, is the keener and more deliberate hunter, but Thor is the bolder and less predictable quarry.

Thor stands on one of the balconies watching her go. Frigga comes to stand beside him.

“You should try to be a little more careful about that girl,” his mother says. “She might take you seriously.”

Thor rests with his knuckles on the white stone balustrade. Sif wears her straight blackbird hair gathered into a braid and it flickers back and forth while she runs, growing farther and farther away each time she reappears between the columns or the hedges.

“I don’t see why she shouldn’t.”

“She intends to become your shield-maiden when you take the throne.” A lilac tree grows just beyond the balcony. Frigga snaps off a purple cluster of blossoms and lifts their heavy perfume to her nose. “Asgard has not had a proper one of those since the time of your grandfather – one day she will swear an oath to defend you with her life, and I believe she’ll mean it more sincerely than most.”

“Sif already knows what that oath entails. It’s the same as all Asgardian warriors take.”

“No.” Frigga slips the lilacs into her belt. “A warrior is sworn to protect the kingdom and the one who rules it. A shield-maiden is sworn to protect and die for the one to whom she makes her vow – be gentle about what else you demand of her in addition.”

Thor considers.  

He is nearly sixteen – or about six hundred and ninety, by a mortal accounting – and has a faint suspicion of what his mother might mean. Women have begun to really look at him, now, turning their heads when he walks past or gazing out at him from beneath their eyelashes; the bolder ones will sometimes survey the whole length of his body without the least compunction, up and down like the scraping tongue of a cat, and Thor is not certain whether he wholly likes this or not.

(Loki certainly gets a delight from it, though. He imitates the girls’ tremulous voices and pretends to swoon, unless he is changing himself into Thor and getting into various compromising situations. Thor usually finds him in the midst of such tricks and lights after him at a dead charge.

This usual ends with collateral damage somewhere. Frigga takes it in stride.)

But the beauty that Thor is growing into with manhood lends him a feeling of invincibility, of irreproachability and inexhaustibility like a lighted torch, and he enjoys this enough to make everything else less complicated.

Sif is different, though. She is so much herself, so present and ubiquitous that Thor cannot think of her from the outside, and he knows her so well by now that he cannot understand her:

He knows, for instance, that she likes to eat peaches just before they are ripe and does not like bread porridge, although she will take a helping of it at every possible meal for the select purpose of letting Thor eat it from her bowl – it tastes better this way, he claims – after she picks out the candied currants for herself. He knows that her favorite song is the mortal ballad about Villemann and Magnhild and that she has a bad habit of chewing her lips raw whenever they are dry. The birthmark just below her right eye matches one that marks her grandmother’s face in a little painting the family keeps of her. Her hands and feet get cold easily, she likes to spin the huge astrolabe in the academy’s main hall whenever she passes by it, and when her horse broke its front leg last spring she stayed in the stable-loft to cry for an hour before taking the animal’s head into her lap so that it would not have to see the knife she was holding.

Thor does not understand why Sif does any of this. He knows only that she does it, and that she is Sif, and this is sufficient. The notion of imagining her as a person apart from his own life – as one of those girls who could look at him, at whom he could look back – seems as foolish as trying to contemplate himself apart from his nation, from his birthright, from his hammer and his own reflection in the mirror.

Besides, he does not ever wish to think about Sif dying for him. He imagines she would have more sense than to do something like that.

Far away, now, in the frame of a door that will let her out into the city streets, Sif pauses one last time and turns to look the way she has come. She sees him still watching her, lifts a hand and waves to him in parting; Thor lifts a hand to wave back.

Frigga says nothing more on the matter.

…

3.

He feels a damp warmth down one side of his face, a red stinging in his eye, but it is not until Thor raises a hand to his head that he realizes his scalp has been slashed nearly to the bone. The sun is burning-hot and the plains of Harokin are so dry the battle has raised a dust cloud. Light comes through it in strange, turning spindles, as though through murky lake-water.

Blood catches in the wick of his mouth and coats his tongue with a taste like salt. He swallows. Thor sits down with ponderous, stunned contemplation, shaking his head to take the ringing from his ears. Mjolnir is in his hand, which must be how he killed the man with the broadsword who now lies at his feet, and he is still sitting this way when Sif finds him. She sets down her dented shield.

“Typical,” she says. “I do all the real fighting and here you are, sunning yourself. Are you quite comfortable?”

“Quite.” His voice sounds thick from the blood that has gotten into his nose. “Did we win?”

“We didn’t lose, at least.” Sif goes to one knee in front of him and sweeps her hand clean on the flattened brown grass before using it to wipe blood from his eye. This finished, she wads up a corner of his dirtied cloak to staunch the wound. “I’d say that’s about the same thing, wouldn’t you?”

“We’ll tell them we won, anyway.”

“So long as you’re buying the drinks for everybody, they’ll probably believe it.”

His head feels weightless and full of a soft, swelling darkness that makes him tired. He nods against Sif’s supporting hand, like a child resisting sleep, but the smoke – far off, the dry grass has caught fire – nettles him awake again. He recalls, dimly, a thing Sif once told him, about how her grandmother with the matching birthmark had been a healer, that her mother had studied the same profession and that the knowledge both women have passed down to her sits tied up neatly like a ball of yarn somewhere in the back of Sif’s mind.

Thor stares at the blood running down Sif’s arm and notes that it is his own.

“Why did you choose this?” he asks.

“Choose what?”

“All –” his mouth is full of a cottony dryness; he lifts Mjolnir to indicate the enemy with the broadsword, whose body Sif has walked around rather than stepping over. “—All this. You might’ve taken a different path.”

“It’s not so different. I told my mother it’s really the same profession as hers, in a way – we both trade in the business of life and death.” Sif turns the cloak to another spot when it grows soaked with his blood. “You’re not dead yet, though, are you? You haven’t answered me about the drinks.”

…

4.

He has felt her standing there for five minutes, silent, but it takes Thor this long to decide what he wants to say. He sorts over his words as though gathering up the pieces to a shattered glass.

He would like to close his eyes, since sometimes it helps him put things in the right order, but whenever he does this he imagines Loki, dropping away from the Bifrost and being borne into the endless night beyond his reach.

“I haven’t thanked you yet,” Thor says, finally, because it seems like the proper thing. He sits on a stone bench in the training yard with its old wych elm and its cool, raked sand. “Heimdall told me you were the one who insisted he let you all go to earth and find me.”

 “Oh. It –” Thor has not turned to see her yet, so he feels rather than watches the moment where Sif wrings her hands. “That was nothing. You would’ve done the same for us.”

He nods, mutely: but you would not have been banished in the first place, Thor wants to tell her next. You would not have been deemed unworthy. You have never been greedy, and vain, and cruel, and thoughtless. You would not have let him fall.

Thor does not say any of these things, though. He does not know which one to say first. Everything pushes into his throat and lodges there, painful and mundane like a stuck piece of apple. Sif comes around the bench and gestures; he moves far enough to make a place for her so that she might sit.

His thoughts shift abruptly to Jane, as they have been doing these past three days. She is so different from what he knows and has known, her brilliance and her candor and her striving, seeking, searching wonder, her warmth and her brazen courage. His love for her seems to have come in an ecstatic instant of revelation, like it does with the heroes in all the old songs, and like the heroes in the songs Thor has made a promise to return for her which he may not be able to keep. 

(Sif has asked to know the mortal woman’s name; Thor has told her.)

He misses Jane. He misses his brother. He misses the boy he was before all this happened, however much he also despises him, because at least that younger, lesser self knew exactly what he was supposed to do next.

And later, when he is alone, Thor will go up into Loki’s private quarters and come out with an ironwood box from his desk – inside the box there will be a papery old snakeskin, a trick-coin with the tails on both sides, the sharpening stone for a dagger and a silver cloak-pin their mother once gave Loki for a birthday present – and he will carry it to a quiet place in the mountains to bury it beneath the oldest ash tree in the forest.

For now, though, Sif leans forward and laces her hands together beneath her knees. If she sees that Thor is crying – which she must, because she is looking directly at him – she pretends not to notice, and maintains this discreet, dignifying pretension for as long as it takes him dry his face.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“So am I,” Thor answers. “I wish I knew whether or not that made a difference.”

…

5.

The last time Thor sees her before the end of the world, it goes like this:

He is coming quickly along a passageway, his head filled with unquiet dreams that get woven together with memories – his mother dead with a sword through her back; his brother found and lost once more; the vision of Heimdall’s blinded eyes and see, he says, see where your power leads; the infinity stones, all gathered in a bright circle against the dark; Asgard falling in flames – and he meets Sif when she turns a corner.

She carries an unsealed scroll and the shield strapped to her back. She startles for a moment but then smiles at the sight of him, hitching her step to close the distance between them faster. She must catch his arm to halt him in mid-stride.

“You’re back,” she laughs. “When did you return?  Fandral told the new recruits you might come by and observe them – your father sent me a summons this morning, but it didn’t mention you were –” she stops, studies the lines of his face more closely, and cocks her head. “You’re not staying.”

“No.” Thor is forced to turn towards her, if only because he is compelled by the grip of her hand. Light slants through an arched window and catches on the vambrace of her armor, so this is what he stares at. “I’ll be gone a while.”

“Where? Earth again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Muspelheim, eventually. I haven’t decided.”

 “I’ll come with you, then.”

“You’re needed here.”

“I’m needed wherever the future king decides to go and get himself in trouble.”

 But there is an agitation to Thor that has been there for some time now, an impatience with himself and with this separate, golden world in which he no longer quite fits, or at least not the same way he used to, and an impatience with the present moment because things are happening that he can no longer control. Sif does not know what he does; she has not seen what he has; she cannot understand what unsearchable things he feels coming towards him from out of the dark.

She is meant to be a king’s shield-maiden, his mother once reminded him, but Thor has already told his father that he would rather be a good man than a great king.

Gently, he works his arm free. Gently, she lets him go.

“All right.” She takes a step back. “But you’ll be careful, won’t you?”

“Aren’t I always?”

He keeps walking.

And looking back, years later, whenever his head is muddled and dense from the drink, Thor will turn this moment over and over and over in his mind. Each time he will attempt to change what happens. Each time it will be the same.  

Why, he will think, why did I not stay with her a little while, why did I not say a few words more to her, why did I not look at her for longer if that was to be the last time I ever saw her, why did I not even say goodbye?

Then he will put his face in his hands and ask forgiveness, for all the things he has done and all the things he has failed to do, but he does not suppose this makes a difference either.  

…

6.

Rocket relates the story in jumps and starts, working backwards several times to an earlier point because he heard it first over a faro table and the details are crossed together with those of various, more unmentionable exploits. Thor makes him repeat it.

“That’s all I got, I swear.” Rocket raises his sharp-nailed black hands. “Some brunette Asgardian chick threw down with a couple thugs on Drez-Lar and nearly got her arm slashed off. The guy I heard it from told me she was carrying a shield.”

The first time he tries, Thor cannot speak. His whole heart has thrown itself into his mouth and beats so hard it puts green and black spots in his vision.

“What kind of shield?”

“The fancy dinner platter kind – how should I know? Do I look like I’ve got especially discerning tastes in that direction?”

Rocket leaps free when Thor reaches for him and throws the coordinates of Drez-Lar up onto the hovering crystal display of _the Benatar._ If the woman really is an Asgardian, the others propose, then somebody will no doubt point her towards Earth and New Asgard sooner or later, and there is no guarantee that she will still be on the planet even if they were to change their course this very minute. She may be an exile, she may be an enemy, she may be a rumor.

Thor does not listen. A kind of hysterical terror has seized him around the throat, as though he is being lifted by a great force simply so that he can be hurled down again.

It is impossible, he thinks. After everything he has lost and everything he has endured, it seems impossible that fate has still not finished punishing him and should have this last cruel, petty trick at the very end of its string, that he should be permitted to believe Sif is alive when he knows – or has thought he knew, these last five years – that she is dead amidst the ruins of Asgard, along with all the others who once called him their friend.

“Take me there,” he tells Quill anyway. “Please.”

Quill stares at him, sees something in Thor’s eyes that he perhaps recognizes, and resets their ship’s course.

When the ship lands Thor leaves it unaccompanied, and when Quill follows him it is only at a distance. This may be wise, on his part, because Thor has already decided he will cleave the head off anyone who gets in his way. He is directed to a little inn that sits on wooden pilings in a marsh, directed next by the pantomime of its owner up a narrow flight of stairs, and he pauses at the top to rake his fingers through his hair. He has already washed and combed and put plaits in it during a fit of nervous distraction – absurdly, absurdly –and looks down at his body. He looks away.

The ancestral prayers he has been saying rapidly unwind from the formalities of tradition to become the silent pleading of a child, grasping at the garments of his parents in the dark: O Father, he thinks, O Mother, I know she won’t be there.

She is gone, like the both of you are. She is gone like Loki, like Heimdall, like Hogun and Volstagg and Fandral, like Tony Stark and Natasha Romanoff who you never had a chance to meet, like our home and our people, like the hammer and the eye and the man I once thought I was or thought that I could be. She won’t be there but please, please, please, give me the strength to bear it when she isn’t.

He opens the door.

The black-haired girl from the training yards, who likes nearly-ripe peaches and children’s songs and once wiped the blood from his face with her hand, is lying on her back in the room’s one low bed. Her face is so thin the bones show beneath it and there is a bandage around one of her arms.

Sif turns her head towards him, smiles and opens her mouth.

“Found you.”

Thor comes to her bedside, kneels, puts his head down next to hers and weeps. Sif brings her shield-arm around him while he does.

He cries until he is exhausted, half-forgetful of what he says in the meantime – I thought you were a dream, he tells her; would I really look like this if I were, she answers drolly – and they draw back to look at one another.

She cups his face in her hand, much the same way Thor once did when he ordered her to live and tell the stories herself. Her gaze follows the scar that runs from his forehead over the hollowed-out eye to his cheek and she brushes the bottom edge of the scar with her thumb.

“I thought I told you to be careful,” she says. “You didn’t listen, did you?”

“Nope.”

“There’s – I suppose there’s a lot you’ll have to tell me.” She swallows. “When you want to.”   

He trails his hand up her arm and holds her wrist to feel the pulse there. He nods.

“I –” she swallows again. “Your father, he – I thought he was your father at the time – I was banished.  I was on Nornheim when – to be honest, I don’t know that anybody’s decided what to call it. It didn’t hurt while it was happening, at least. I’m just fortunate nobody came around with a dustpan. And all that time, you were –”

Her mouth works silently. The line of it trembles.

“—I’m sorry,” she manages; her eyes, whose greengage color Thor has always liked so much, well up suddenly and spill over. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come to find you sooner.”

Something lances through him.

This possibility has occurred to Thor in the last few minutes, of course, that some decree had decided Sif be chosen and turned to ashes, but it is not until now that Thor realizes what this means: that she was among all the others who were gone, only kind of gone, that all the while he was fighting to get her back and did not even know it.

He puts his own arms around her, this time, taking care not to lift her or disturb her injury. The woven reeds of the bed creak beneath the added weight and he is given an instant to reconsider – perhaps she does not want to touch him, when he is like this – before Sif tucks her face against his shoulder.

She is the one who starts to weep now, though she stops after a while with a long, easing sigh. It causes a loose lock of his hair to shift and she slips it back in place.

…


End file.
